A string is made of characters, an array might contain anything.

array_merge will not work with any iterable

The docs only talk about 2008 and up, not sure if those should be added
to 2005 too.

It was possible to provide escaping through the second argument but that
was more like a hack.

Inherit table charset/collation from db charset

Expressed PARAM_*_ARRAY through other constants to eliminate the dependency on the actual constant values

Fixes #2953.

This reverts commit e3ab1276, reversing
changes made to f988b0a6.